Introduction
The engineering team at FuturFusion is very happy to announce the initial stable versions of both Migration Manager and Operations Center!
Both are critical components alongside IncusOS and Incus itself in providing the full FuturFusion Cloud stack providing a smooth path off of VMware or similar closed source virtualization platforms and onto a modern Open Source private cloud solution.
Migration Manager
Migration Manager is a full featured migration planning and actual migration tool currently aimed at moving from VMware to Incus.
It currently supports both individual VMware ESXi as well as VMware vSphere on both version 7 and 8 (with 9 support coming very soon) but it’s designed to be flexible enough to gain other migration sources in the future (Proxmox, OpenStack, public clouds, … would all be interesting options).
On VMware specifically, it supports using background block transfers to allow for extremely short downtime when the migration actually happens.
Under the hood, Migration Manager creates VMs on the target Incus cluster, runs a temporary migration environment in that target VM which then connects to the source environment, performs frequent incremental disk transfers, runs a dry-run of post-migration actions and waits for a scheduled maintenance window to fully complete the migration.
Migration Manager itself supports talking to hundreds of different source and target environments, running any number of migration batches in parallel, each batch with its own set of maintenance windows, instance filters, affinity/anti-affinity rules and custom placement logic.
You can run it without any of the advanced features to just move all VMs from one environment to another very quickly and easily, or you can use it to plan and orchestrate the migration of hundreds of thousands of VMs across multiple sites with migrations getting scheduled across hundreds of maintenance windows spread over months.
Documentation: Migration Manager documentation
Operations Center
Operations Center is our way to manage large enterprise deployments of Incus. It supports deploying and managing servers using IncusOS and then creating Incus clusters using those, finally keeping track of the global inventory of all objects across all clusters.
It’s designed to work both in connected and isolated environments, being the only service that the other servers in the environment need to talk to and supporting retrieving artifacts directly from our image servers or having them uploaded by the user.
As it currently stands, Operations Center handles the synchronization and distribution of IncusOS update files to all servers attached to it. It supports the creation of registration tokens with associated configuration seeds, generating ISOs or USB drive images for installation of the actual servers. It then supports configuring networking on those newly registered servers and finally creating Incus clusters from them, either by passing in configuration directly or through the use of configuration templates.
The cluster deployment itself is done through Terraform (technically OpenTofu) and Operations Center provides the Terraform state following the cluster creation, making it easy to integrate in an Infrastructure As Code environment where any further change to the cluster can be performed through gitops.
Operations Center then subscribes to events on all its deployed clusters to maintain its global inventory, making it easy to find objects across many clusters and get immediate links back to their actual location.
This is effectively the bare minimum needed to deploy production clusters and we have a lot more work lined up to improve this tool significantly, including:
- Advanced update rollout and tracking, including rolling evacuations
- Direct integration with server BMCs for automated provisioning
- TLS certificate management across the entire environment
- Provide a local image server (both Incus native format and OCI)
- Handle initial provisioning of OpenFGA
And that’s just for what we have planned over the next few months!
Documentation: Operations Center documentation
Video overview
Here is a full video overview of the FuturFusion Cloud stack we recorded a little while back:
Contributing, support and discussions
Both projects are fully open source, released under the Apache 2.0 license and generally are very inspired by how we do things within the Incus project.
They are available under the FuturFusion organization on Github and they have Github’s Discussions feature enabled to allow for development and support discussions to happen there.
The FuturFusion team is also lurking on this forum and we have setup appropriate tags that we can easily monitor.
Commercial support on both projects is offered to our customers as part of the full FuturFusion Cloud solution which includes HypervisorOS (our build of IncusOS), Migration Manager, Operations Center and of course Incus itself.
We hope that those two projects will be interesting and useful to folks outside of our customer base too, whether in a homelab environment or production environments that don’t need the full service approach of the FuturFusion Cloud offering.
All development happens on Github, all currently planned work is tracked through Github issues and milestones. We very much would welcome both feedback and contributions to either project!